The end of Pornhub’s campaign of intimidation
Washington Examiner 11 January 2021
Family First Comment: “the company lied about being responsive to reports from victims about their videos. In reality, requests and comments about these filmed sexual crimes were repeatedly ignored, covered-up, and demeaned.”
On Dec. 4, the New York Times exposed Pornhub, the world’s most popular pornography website, as “infested” with illegal child sexual abuse. Visa and Mastercard confirmed that finding in a resulting investigation and immediately ceased processing payments for the porn giant.
Mindgeek, Pornhub’s parent company, responded by quickly removing 10 million videos from the site, almost 80% of its content, because it had not reliably verified the age or consent of those in the videos and could not ensure they were not children or rape victims.
These revelations were no surprise to me. I had called last February for shutting Pornhub down for this very reason. More than 2 million people signed my petition and joined the resulting #Traffickinghub.
Why did it take so long for Mindgeek to acknowledge this obvious problem? Why did it take global condemnation and financial strangulation? Because Mindgeek is a rogue organization, privately owned by secretive international interests that cared only about maximizing the amount of its content, irrespective of its source or nature. Its only concern was to return a maximum profit to its hidden owners.
No one was more aware of the illegal content on Mindgeek’s sites than Mindgeek itself. The company deceptively bills itself not as the world’s largest pornography titan but as a “tech” leader in search engine optimization and data mining. It has become clear that hiding the truth about itself is Mindgeek’s modus operandi.
Over the last year, this obfuscation strategy let Mindgeek wage an aggressive and sophisticated campaign to cover up and deflect and to discredit and intimidate those who dared to speak out. Leading this attack was Pornhub’s vice president Corey Urman, regularly quoted under pseudonyms such as “Corey Price” and “Blake White.”
READ MORE: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/the-end-of-pornhubs-campaign-of-intimidation
